Wadia 170i and Benchmark Dac1 - anyone try it?

I believe there is a lot of misinformation and wrong thinking on digital, me included, as I am certainly no expert.

An observation of mine is that I think many of us have an analog mentality of copies when thinking of digital. To clarify, think of taking a photograph and making a copy on a copying machine, then taking the new copy and making another copy, etc. In doing this we expect the quality of each successive photo to be worse.

This is the mentality carried over to digital, which I do not see as an accurate view. I read comments from some where I can tell there is disbelief or hesitation that the iPod copy can sound as good as the CD it was copied from, because it is a copy and “loss” is assumed.

A good analogy I have read to debunk this thinking is of a computer program, it is 1 and 0’s just like digitally stored music. You can copy that program as many times as you want and it will work, if there was any loss the program would fail.

Besides the 1’ and 0’s, there is clocking information passed along in the data stream, this is the information that a DAC can make a difference with, what is known as “reclocking”, not all DAC’s do this. (The DAC in question within this thread, the DAC1, does reclock.)
Again, I am no expert, so anyone more informed than I can feel free to correct and/or add to my comments.

If all I say is accurate, there is no reason the iPod should sound worse than a transport. It is my opinion it is about the DAC one uses.

As for Apple Lossless, many, including myself in the past, viewed this as a compressed format that losses data. This is not the case, if it has been explained to me correctly, hence why those in the know classify it with WAV, AIFF, etc. Here is how it was explained to me. If you have a data string of ‘00000’ (5 zeros), instead of storing all 5 zeros, it would be stored as ‘50’. In doing so, the Apple Lossless file can be converted back to the original ‘00000’, whereby nothing is “lost”.
One more time I’ll add the disclaimer of stating I am not an expert on this.

Brian,

I think you got it. The point is that as long as Adasilva uses the DAC1 the "evidence" suggests that it really does not matter what transport he uses (provided it doesn't mess with the bits, as some apparently do).

If Adasilva finds the DAC1 to be a substandard DAC compared to the much better sound of top echelon players then he might, in future, face the interface issues as to what other DAC goes well with the Wadia 170i & possibly what type of digital cable he needs and what length. This is the situation faced when using the majority of DAC designs, which are NOT demonstrated through test data to be totally immune to incoming jitter on the digital signal. In this case, careful selection of components that work well together is mandatory and there are no guarantees, such as Benchmark offers in their claims (In this scenario, everything in the chain should really be as low jitter as possible and, as a general rule, a separate clock signal interface is usualy preferred to qualify as "top echelon" - Meitner gear comes to mind)

BTW - "jitter" is certainly the end of the world - it might be better to have a tubed DAC with a great warm and musical sound than an analytical DAC with better jitter rejection. This is where individual subjectivity comes into it - the lesser of Evils - the horrible pro sound versus the organic warmth of something that sounds much better.

Dave, I used XLO 4.1 signature digital cable then and was really pleased with digital.

Using tube buffer/DAC is like using honey to smooth out chipped windscreen.

A separate box for the clock does nothing to assure that it'll outperform a clock combined with another digital device, like a DAC or transport. Generally you'd expect the separate box clocks to be among the best, due to price, but that isn't necesarily the case.

Dave

I'm using the Analysis Plus Digital Oval coax digital cable with good results, but I can't distinguish it from the one Wadia sent with the 170i. I think that the reclocking in the PD is making up for any error introduced by my cable... maybe. I tried an XLO balanced IC owned by a friend and found it very neutral.

Ah... tube/DACs, what an oxymoron in my mind. If you need to add honey, there's something wrong that needs to be fixed rather than covered up, at least IMHO. I like your point of view Teddy.

Dave